During one of our recent webinars, more than a few people expressed surprise about how email marketing metrics are calculated, so it’s a good time to step back and review. Today we’re looking at email conversion rate.

Email conversion rate is probably both the most valuable and difficult metric to even get a hold of, much less be able to manage well. The primary reason that it’s so hard to get a hold of is that many email service providers don’t offer tracking capability for conversion or have any way to capture email’s impact on conversion.

There’s a valid reason for this: most email conversion tracking done today is last-touch attribution only, which paints a woefully incomplete picture of email marketing’s total impact on your digital marketing efforts. Email marketing can do far more than just sell things to people in unfocused blasts. As a marketing tool, it can drive and focus attention to activities which lead to conversion two, three, or more steps downstream from the actual email.

Luckily, regardless of which email service provider you use, you have access to a powerful, more inclusive conversion tracking tool: Google Analytics.

First, you’ll need to establish what a conversion is. What action or actions on your site generate value, and what is that value worth? For example, if you’re building your list, what is the value of an email subscriber to you? If you’re selling stuff, what’s the median* value of a shopping cart? Once you know what activity on your website generates value, you can assign that as a goal with a goal value in Google Analytics. More details on how to set that up are located here.

Second, you’ll want to make sure that your email service provider supports Google Analytics. If they don’t, you will have to manually tag all of the links in your email using the Google Analytics URL builder. WhatCounts customers should contact their account managers to have it enabled in their respective platforms. (both Publicaster and Professional editions have GA support built in)

Third, fire up Google Analytics after a send and scroll down to the Conversions section:

You’ll find your way to the Assisted Conversions section. From here, click on the Other menu and create a new channel grouping:

Inside the setup screen that follows, create a filter for Source with a RegExp that matches the following text: Publicaster|WhatCountsEmail (obviously, if you’re not a WhatCounts customer, you’ll have to substitute your own email service provider’s tracking codes in this box instead)

You’ve now got a custom grouping that shows you the total conversion impact of your email marketing:

Here we can see our email marketing program’s effects on all of our digital marketing efforts. Our email marketing closed 186 conversions in its last interaction, meaning someone went straight from the email to the activity of value. We also see that email added an additional 112 conversions where the subscriber did not immediately convert but did eventually, for an extra 40% impact on our business. Ask yourself this: if you’re doing last-touch only conversion tracking, how much more impact is your email marketing program having that you’re not aware of?

There’s one more area of conversion tracking that we need to address. To interpret total conversion tracking properly, you need to add together the last touch and assisted conversions together and track them over time. One important calculation to make is the ratio of assisted to last touch conversions, as shown here over the last 8 issues of our newsletter:

Tracking this ratio will let you know if your content is more action-focused (more last touch than assist) or more value-focused (more assist than last touch). Neither is better than the other as long as total conversions continues to increase. In the example above, there’s an interesting inverse relationship between last touch conversions and total conversions – the more action-focused the newsletter is, the better it converts overall. Thus, we can use this insight to alter the content of the newsletter to offer more action opportunities (while still providing value), but if we lean too much in value-focused content’s direction without providing as much action-focused content, our overall email marketing program’s performance suffers.

If you’d like help setting this sort of detailed analysis up, please feel free to contact our Strategic Service department.

Conversion tracking might seem to be the last word in email marketing metrics, but it’s not. Tomorrow, to conclude this series, we’ll look at the variety of deliverability metrics and what they mean.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

*Technical side note: for any set of statistics where you have an asymmetrical distribution, use median values rather than average values. It gives you a better picture of where the middle actually is.

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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During one of our recent webinars, more than a few people expressed surprise about how email marketing metrics are calculated, so it’s a good time to step back and review. Today, we’re looking at clickthrough rate (CTR).

Clickthrough rate would, on the surface, be the simplest of metrics to understand – how many people clicked on something in your email message? There are a few subtleties to it that are worth discussing, including two distinct versions of clickthrough rate, TCTR and UCTR.

TCTR is total clickthrough rate, or the total number of clicks that an email message’s links received as a percentage of subscribers. This tells you how popular the content in your email message is. TCTR is subject to a certain amount of noise, however. Things that can influence TCTR include:

• People opening the email and clicking through on more than one device.
• People sharing a link socially from your email
• Search engines indexing the view-in-browser version of your email and auto-clicking through all the links
• Firewalls (especially for B2B subscribers) that automatically follow each link to verify that the email contains no spyware or malware
• People clicking on lots of links in your message repeatedly

UCTR is unique clickthrough rate, or the number of unique clicks an email message’s links as a percentage of subscribers. If you opened an email on your phone, clicked a link, then opened it later on your desktop and clicked the same link, your contribution to the TCTR would be 2 but to the UCTR would be 1 because you’re one unique individual. If you opened the email later and clicked on the same link 3 more times, your contribution to the TCTR would be 5 but to the UCTR would still be 1.

Which one is most important? Neither. They both have their uses. TCTR can give you a sense of how popular the links are in your content – if TCTR matches UCTR 1:1 it can sometimes mean that no one is coming back to your newsletter later to re-click on things or sharing your content links with others. UCTR gives you a clean number of how many unique clicks were attained without all the noise and confusion of TCTR, which is why many ESPs including WhatCounts use UCTR to calculate click to open rates.

The final computation that matters when it comes to clickthrough rates is CTOR – Click to Open Rate. When we talk about clickthrough rates, we’re generally speaking about clicks as a percentage of all subscribers. This can be misleading, especially if there have been significant changes in the list’s composition since previous sends. CTOR gives us a rate of how many clicks there were as a percentage of opens. Let’s see how this helps us understand our content’s actionable items better.

Let’s say you have a list of 100,000 subscribers. You send them a message, and 10,000 subscribers open the message. Of that, 1,000 of the openers click on something. Your open rate is 10%. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll use UCTR for the clickthrough rate, which means that you have a UCTR of 1% (10% of 10%). Your CTOR is 10%. So far, so good.

Now let’s say you blow up your list. You run a massive Google Adwords campaign and attract 50,000 people to your list in a month, but they’re all barely-interested subscribers who were just subscribing for a coupon or a special offer or something. You send to your list and none of the new people bother opening your message, but your core of 10,000 from your original list keeps on opening. Your open rate now drops to 6.67%. Of those, the same 1,000 click on stuff in your message. Your UCTR is now an appallingly bad .667%. However, your CTOR remains the same – 10%.

If you just relied on open rate and UCTR, you might think your email marketing program is suddenly failing, losing 33% of its performance from one send to the next, when the reality is that the core of your list, your fans, are still behaving the same. Instead, you now know that your Adwords campaign was a colossal waste of money because those subscribers aren’t doing anything, but the heart and soul of your email marketing is still strong. That’s why it’s important to examine all of your clickthrough rate metrics in context, as part of the bigger picture of your email marketing program.

The final piece of advice I’ll leave you with is from our industry averages blog post: ignore industry averages. They’re worthless. Instead, focus on improving your clickthrough rates and click to open rates in very email you send, so that your email marketing program is constantly improving. That’s the only set of measurements that truly matter.

Tomorrow, we’ll tackle the tricky subject of email conversion rates.

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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During one of our recent webinars, more than a few people expressed surprise about how open rates are calculated, so it’s a good time to walk through the discussion of how email marketing metrics work. Today, we’re going to start with the open rate.

When an email is sent to a subscriber, it typically includes a 1×1 pixel image (usually white or clear) that is tracked by your email service provider. When images load in the email on the subscriber’s computer or device, it’s considered an opened email. This, for example, is opened:

This is considered not opened:

They’re exactly the same, but the latter email does not have images turned on. Even though we’re reading it right now, even if we read every line of text and scroll all the way to the bottom, until images are turned on, it’s not considered opened and will not be reported here:

What percentage of subscribers to your newsletters are reading them without images turned on? There’s no way of knowing simply by looking at the metrics. In order to make this determination accurately, you’d need to survey your subscribers and ask them.

The good news is that there isn’t any email service provider that functions differently. No one has figured out how to track opens more accurately than with an image load, so if you’re switching from one email service provider to another, how they track opens should be the same as your previous vendor. That in turn means you can still do apples-to-apples comparisons of your list’s open rates.

This also means that if you force an email service provider’s software to send pure text only emails, there’s no image sent along with it, and it will always show an open rate of zero.

The logical followup question is, can you improve your open rate reporting? The answer is yes. In order to get more accurate open rates, you have to give people a reason to turn images on. In our newsletters, we make use of the alt tag for images to tell people to turn images on. Here’s an example:

Depending on how much your subscribers trust you, you can also encourage them to whitelist you and allow images to be turned on all the time. Remind them in the text of the email to do so. Here’s what the image whitelist option looks like in GMail; other email clients will have similar options:

If you want to get creative, you can always use creative images that encourage people to turn on images for the sake of seeing them. If you’ve got a photographer on staff or you’re willing/able to use Creative Commons licensed photos, adding photography to your newsletters is another way to get people to turn images on.

As another example, in my weekly personal newsletter, I recycle popular Internet memes as unsubscribe buttons. I’ve gotten feedback from subscribers that they turn images on each week just to see what the button looks like that week. Here are a few recent examples:

Obviously, if you want to use this concept, make it fit your professional theme and brand. While fun, these images would be out of place in our corporate newsletter.

In our subsequent posts in this series, we’ll look at click through rate, action rate, and other common email metrics so that you better understand the numbers you see every time you push the Send button. Stay tuned!

Christopher S. Penn
Director of Inbound Marketing, WhatCounts

Learn 18 different ways to find and grow your email marketing and social media ROI! Promote email with social, social with email, learn how to set up a Facebook Page for email subscriptions, and much more. Download the free eBook now.	Lifecycle email marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in digital marketing, but how can you make it work for you? Download our free eBook and learn 5 lifecycle frameworks plus practical applications to your email marketing program.

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